Alsace Deserves Better: Celebrating the Greatest White Wines in the World with Mélanie Pfister
Class transcript:
I already hit record, Zoe. Thank you. Welcome, welcome one and all. Happy Sunday to you all. Thank you all so much for joining us. It is a pleasure and an honor to have you here with us as ever, having made this a part of your weekly routine and excited to explore an amazing subject, a personal favorite of mine, and a set of wines in a region that deserves much more attention and love than it commonly receives on this side of the Atlantic. We have had a number of notable guests join us over the course of our 20-plus weeks. I'm doing this every Sunday, but none more notable than today's. We are thrilled to welcome joining us from just outside of Strasbourg in France. We have Melanie Pfister, the one and the only.
Thank you so much for joining us, Melanie. Thanks. Thanks, Bill. And then with me, as always, of course, Zoe, participating from elsewhere in the rather large dining room. I'm going to give folks a few minutes to straggle in here, as always. Alsace is a region dominated by white wines. I think sometimes Americans have trouble with that because, you know, when people want to show off to, you know, their friends and their, you know, business partners, they break out a red wine. But Alsace makes wines that are equally age-worthy. They are, you know, delicate and elegant, but they are nonetheless powerful. You know, they're the ballet dancers of the wine's world, and they prove that you can be equally sensitive and strong at the same time. And I think that, you know, is certainly worth celebrating.
So we're celebrating exclusively white wines today. We have sold some Alsatian Pinot Noirs through our store as well, and Melanie makes a beautiful one herself. Those are well worth exploring, but we're going to embrace the fact that 90% of the wines coming from this region are white, and the four, quote-unquote, noble grapes out of Alsace are all white grapes. Now, we've been selling several wines through our store. We have a pair, a pair of Rieslings, and these are all kind of structured around wines that Melanie herself provides. We have a pair of Rieslings, then we have a sibling rivalry, Pinot Blanc and Pinot Gris from Alsace, and then not one, not two, but three of Alsace's most historic, most storied vineyards in Uplight.
And thanks to all of you who decided to take that plunge, and thanks to Zoe for batching all of those wines out. It was not a labor of love. It is tedious work, but we really wanted to showcase, you know, the Engelberg and give you a sense of that, you know, wine in context, because one of the things that makes Alsace great is the diversity of cuvées, the diversity of offerings from, you know, relatively small producers, and the diversity of the geology of the place. There is, you know, for somebody that is interested in, you know, a French notion of terroir, there is no more interesting region in the country than Alsace. So thank you, Zoe, for your time, and I hope that you will enjoy this experience at Alsace, because in such a small, compact place you have this amazing diversity of aspects and soil types.
But without further ado, welcome to all, hopefully we'll have a few more folks straggling in. Special thanks to friends and family coming together through this virtual platform, and those of you joining us for the first time. In case you missed her the first time around, we have the one, the only, Melanie Pfister joining us. She is eighth generation winemaker. She's also incidentally president of Femmes de Vins. Did I say that correctly, Melanie? I, yeah, Femmes de Vins is an association of women winemakers in France. Yes, so she is an all-around badass. She makes amazing wine and, you know, she is, you know, gracious enough to join us at 10 o'clock from her estate just outside of Strasbourg. I'm going to give a brief intro to Alsace as a region, kind of, you know, historically, geologically, in terms of wines they make.
But then, you know, for the sake of our guests, I'm going to turn it over to Melanie with a series of questions about the region and the wines that we're trying here today. But as always, a bit of verse to kick things off here. And we are going to start with a bit of verse from none other than Goethe. Goethe, hugely influential German romantic poet, polymath, philosopher. He spent much of his life in Strasbourg, actually, and he famously tried to conquer his fear of heights by climbing to the top of the Strasbourg Cathedral Tower, which for two centuries, the cathedral in Strasbourg was the tallest building in the world. It's pretty amazing. I didn't realize that before, you know, digging deep in the research for this class.
But he used to step out onto a ledge to scare himself into the ground, surmounting his fear of heights. And he also wrote some of the most beautiful poems in the German language, one of which we're translating for you here to kick things off. So this is Permanence in Change. Can these blossoms early blessing last not even one brief hour? Warm west wind already shakes them down in bounteous gloomy shower. Shall the green I lately thanked for shade give pleasure to my eyes? Soon the withering storms will strew it, withered pale by autumn skies. Want to pluck the fruit that hangs there, get your share, and do not wait. These are ripening already, those are soon to germinate. Just like that, your pleasant valley alters with each rush of rain.
Ah, in the selfsame river, you swim once, but not again. Let the end and the beginning into one point unify, swifter ever than these fleeting objects. Let yourself speed by. Thank the news whose favor promised this imperishable find. Your heart's content joined forever to the form within your mind. And that is a particularly good translation of that poem that preserves some of the original wine scheme, which is blessedly difficult to do. Thank you all for putting up with that, as you do every week, because I know not everybody loves poetry, but I do. And, you know, as a winemaker, I think as a lover of wine, celebrating the impermanence of nature, celebrating wine as an agricultural product, is one of the kind of chief things that we do.
So very briefly here, just to give you all an introduction to the region. One of my favorite quotes about Alsace, Alsace, rather, and Alsatian wine is from Hugh Johnson. He says that they make Germanic wine the French way, and I'll show you a map of Alsace here, because it all begins with the map, and give you a sense of where Melanie is joining us from. So you can see the larger map of France here. Alsace is a borderland, historically between France and Germany—you have Germany to your right, to the east, and France to your west, to your left. There are two natural borders, dividing the countries. One is the Vosges Mountains to the west, the other is the Rhine, which is kind of the German Ganges and flows from south to north into the North Sea ultimately and constitutes the eastern border of Alsace.
Alsace is a relatively small region, it's 115 meters from north to south essentially and bears 25 miles from east to west and is roughly divided into two kinds of like geographic realms. You have what is known as the O Rhine, which is the high Rhine. You're higher up on the river, it should be said, but you're actually moving south. So for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere that seems weird to call something higher more southerly, but it makes sense when you consider the river flows to the north. Melanie Pfister, our illustrious guest, is joining us from the Vos Rhine, the lower Rhine. Which is closer to Strasbourg and Melanie's estate here embraces the region just west of Strasbourg. And Melanie, which village are you located in here properly?
It's not even written on your map, it's called Dahlenheim. It's where the Engelberg points, so it's just just here, yeah. So very, very small. I imagine as a young person growing up it it felt very sleepy. It was so, yeah. Small village, 800 inhabitants. Mostly farmers, winemakers, and yeah, that's it. Great. And I will say, having shared this map that, you know, one of my favorite things about Alsace is its amazing geological diversity. So, Alsace, in a sense, was formed through the action of these massive fault lines, essentially. So, you know, you get a sense of the fault lines here that run up and down the Rhine Valley. So you have this massive kind of twin mountains that formed over 300, 400 million years ago.
On one side, the Vosges; and the bedrock here is mostly granite, and to the east in Germany, you have the Black Forest. But as those mountain peaks were spread apart through the action of these fault lines, you got the breaking apart of these various layers of rock. And typically, you know, in terms of the Grand Cru, in terms of the rock formations in Alsace, they work in, you know, the Alsatian language and in German. So you have Bunch Sandstein, which is, you know, essentially a colored sandstone. They will say, what's a Grès-de-bauche in France, in French as well, which is an older softer rock. And then Musselkoch, which exists quite a bit in Germany, which is a very hard limestone laden with fossils.
And then Kuiper, which is more kind of like a marl, more of a siltstone or mudstone, and degrades very differently. But in this very small region, what is really remarkable about the region of Alsace is you have this incredible diversity of soils. So I'm going to share one more screen grab. This is from a presentation that, you know, a French geologist and master of wine did on Alsace. You get a sense that as these various layers erode, and this is a cross-section from closer to Reedville, so this is well south of Melanie, but at these layer erodes, you get, you know, this various exposition of individual vineyard sites. And from one vineyard to the next, you could be expressing, you know, soils that, you know, were deposited anywhere from, you know, 50 to 100 million years apart.
And that diversity, you know, for me is what makes Alsace so interesting from one end to the next. And, you know, it is a region that is defined by this diversity of sites. It is the fact that there are a lot of very small producers like Melanie making really, you know, remarkable, amazing wines. And, you know, I think some consumers get frustrated because it's not the case as in, you know, you know, Sancerre or Burgundy. That people are making, you know, on a small scale, one wine. Everyone makes, you know, half a dozen, different cuvées, different grapes, different, you know, wines from different places. But I think, you know, as consumers, as wine lovers, I want us to lean in to that diversity. And I'm going to hand it over to Melanie here, but this is a quote from her. She said, 'Wines of Alsace have a double identity, a great variety, which we'll talk about in the context of Riesling, as well as origin and soil. Varietal speaks to everyone while origin is something special. And I think that, you know, peace that is all about origin is something that we will be, you know, kind of discovering for ourselves here. I'm worried, I fear that we have lost Melanie. Zoe, does that appear to be the case?
It appears we have lost our illustrious guest, and I tried to keep it short today.' I was under 15 minutes there, Zoe, for the sake of our presentation, and sadly, Melanie has kind of floated off the mortal coil. Zoe, if you could keep an eye on the participant roster here, hopefully she'll be able to join us here shortly, and this is just a small matter of technical difficulties, and you've gotten a small taste of just how lovely she is, so hopefully she'll be able to join us. But without further ado, I'm going to bring back this map of Alsace, and we're going to kind of briefly start to talk about the wines from Melanie's corner of the region, because it is a little different.
It's a little different than a lot of the wines I think that people are used to from throughout the rest of the region. So it should be said that Melanie is at the northern extremity. So the Grand Cru she talked about, Engelberg, which is the Angel's Hill, is the third most northerly Grand Cru, and she really is off the beaten path. Zoe and I were talking about the number of tourists that she typically sees in a given year. So Melanie was saying that the people who visit her domain are the ones that really want to visit her. Alsace is one of the most heavily trafficked tourist wine regions in France, but she doesn't see a lot of the casual tourists. She sees people that actually want to see Domaine Pfister, and she really likes that.
So again, she's a little bit off the beaten path, and one thing I didn't mention vis-à-vis Alsace is that you have this ridge of mountains, the Vosges, to your west, and then you have the major vineyards. The Vosges are on this slope, the kind of like lower hills of those mountains as they descend to the Rhine. And those mountains, because weather formations move from west to east, they cast a rain shadow. So that means the clouds themselves get hung up on the mountains, on the western side of the mountains. And Alsace receives comparatively little rain, and it's comparatively drier and comparatively sunnier than would be, you know, any other region as far north as it is in France, given that you're, you know, sitting somewhere between the 47th and 49th parallel.
So, you know, in the summer, and Melanie's about to start harvest in about a week or two, you know, you get very long days and a very long ripening window, which is hugely auspicious, but it's also very dry, and they're experiencing quite a bit of drought at this point in Melanie's end of Alsace. And Melanie's wines, compared to the wines that we'll taste from further south within Alsace, are, you know, brighter. They're lighter. They're much more electric than are the wines in the rest of the region. Melanie, are you there? Yes, I'm back. Ah, brilliant. Yes, yes, yes. So, we were just about to taste, I was honestly killing time, and trying not to bore people. I was worried.
I was deeply worried that they were just going to hear me talk about Alsace and not to get to hear you talk about Alsace, which would have been a huge tragedy, would have been, you know, ignorant Americans. But, you know, the American white male psalm explains Alsace to one of the most highly knowledgeable, you know, winemakers in the region, and we don't, we don't want that. So Melanie, just a couple quick questions to kick things off for you. How long has your family been making wine just outside of Strasbourg? I'm the eighth generation, so the first fester settled in 1780, at least. Oh, wow. So that, that would be before our constitutional convention. We were a young nation. We were a young nation. That was before the French Revolution.
So they kept their heads, everybody kept their heads in the family, which is good. And actually, it's a family, and many, many families come from Switzerland. To Alsace at that point in time. Yes, a 30 years war. Essentially refugees in their own era. Yeah, true. Now, we are going to start tasting. The Riesling, the Berg. Now this is from two different sites. What do you like about working with Riesling in your part of Alsace? I was telling everyone how you're situated much further north, and the Vosges Mountains, which act as a rain shadow, and they, you know, make the region hotter and drier than it would be otherwise. They have less of an influence in your part of Alsace because the mountains themselves are a little lower. Yeah.
And the particular situation of the Alenheim is that our hills are rolling hills, so steep, because they are detached from the Vosges Mountains. That makes that there's probably more giving freshness in the countryside and in the wines. And all of our vineyards are always on hills. Yeah. And further south, when you drive around the wine road, you see that there are hills steeper than by us, and vineyards on plain. We have no vineyards on plain. Everything is on hill sides. And that's why we've always been cultivating vines on the hillsides. And my ancestors were winemakers and farmers. And in the plain, there was other crops. And trees and orchards. So with this particular wine, you know, what are you trying to, you know, create? It's two different vineyard sites.
You know, this is your quote-unquote entry-level wine. I think it's a very aristocratic kind of quote-unquote entry-level. You know, what do you like about making this wine and, you know, what do you hope, you know, people who are trying it at home, you know, what do you want them to know about it? Yeah. It's our entry-level Riesling. And as I mentioned, it's already on hills and on a very nice Muschelkalk, limestone soil. And that makes those two sites, Aufdemberg and Silberberg, are in a kind of continuity. It's oriented, it's south, southeast oriented. And the soil, the topsoil is, you know, it's very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very moist and helplessly. Kind of superintendent, kind of more flaky. Malt and I think it's a little sort of elemental salt deposit on one side in a and under the topsoil.
So, um, it generates an average I would say 1 m, 1 m deep. And then we have the bedrock which is Muschelkalk. And here the, the Riesling is a very, a very nice grape to grow there because because it gives Riesling with very straight structure, very, very focused. It's, it's not a kind of broad Riesling. And, and Riesling on limestone give always kind of, you know, straight structure, like, dense Riesling. You'll compare it with a granite Riesling and that's, it's a question of structure and broadness of acidity. Yeah, for me, you know, so Riesling is a more basic soil and they're wines that they don't shout. I think they're a little more, you know, they're a little more delicate, but they're, they're very, they're very, you know, kind of long and lean.
There's something balletic and graceful about them. You know, whereas we're going to try here, we have a wine from Domaine Weinbach and, you know, Weinbach is, is a very different site. So I'll pull up the map again. So people get a better, you know, feel for, you know, the different orientation here. So Melanie is close to Strasbourg. Just, you know, off of the Église Grand Cru. The other wine that we're drinking here is from Schlossberg. I had trouble finding it quite as, quite as easily, just, just outside of Schlossberg. Let's see where, oh, come on, where are you? It's right. Oh, there we go. Great. Yeah. So just in the, in the shadow of, of Schlossberg, really in the heart of Strasbourg, right in the heart of the Oranien.
Much more granitic soils here. The Vosges mountains are a lot taller. And also this is a Riesling that is made in Fuder. So Melanie, you work for all of your wines, with the exception of the Pinot Noir and the Pinot Gris, I believe, in stainless steel. Why do you work with stainless steel as opposed to other types of winemaking vessels? Stainless steel brings this crystalline, pure style that my father implemented in the domain. Of course, it's more reductive. Some growers in Alsace still do aged wines in foudre, which brings more tiny bit of oxidation or micro-oxygenation. We know that. So our wines age a bit slower and they need a longer aging. That's why we do at least 12 months of aging, but now I have 40 different plots, 60 tanks, and much longer agings now, until 18, 24 months if needed.
They develop much more elegantly when the wine is in mass than in bottle. It's very important. Yeah. I love that. Oh, sorry. I came across this quote on your website that I really appreciated. Your grandfather said that he essentially made the kinds of wines that he wanted to drink himself. They were very dry wines, bracing the kind of wines that were good with food. He's the one who drinks the most of his wines. So why should he make any concessions for someone else's taste? In making the wines, and I think that's just really, really, and do you feel like you are kind of maintaining that house style yourself? Yeah, definitely, and Alsace, the thing is that Alsace has no rules regarding residual sugar in the wines.
You know that when you take a Chablis or a Meursault, it has to be dry, because rules are like this. In Alsace, everything is possible, and many, many makers, when in the 90s, the style went much bigger, but my father, he was, it's during his generation, evolved to sweeter wines, but he kept this line, and so I was not, I didn't have to do a kind of revolution of the style, because the style was dry, and I definitely keep this dry house style at home. And I feel like, to some extent, too, it's a response to your unique situation within Alsace. I feel like if you were closer to Kaisersberg, you might make wine differently than you do where you are in Strasbourg. It's possible, it's possible, because a kind of sweeter style was also influenced by consumption.
And of course, for a consumer, it's flattering to have a sweeter wine. When they go in a tasting room, when it's sweet, it tastes a bit better than a dry Riesling, which is really focused and with a pretty high acidity. But we are not influenced by tourists, because Dalenheim is out of nowhere. The Wine Road doesn’t cross Dalenheim, so we are; we were independent regarding to that, and that was a really good, a really good thing, finally. So you evolved independently, and were able to maintain a unique identity. Exactly, yeah. And that’s really, it’s really cool, because now I can make vertical tasting of the what it is, and Riesling are dry, Pinot Gris are dry. And there aren’t so many domains in Alsace able to do that.
Yeah, and I think part of sometimes the frustration for American consumers tasting Alsatian wines is that it’s a bit of a box of chocolates and you don’t know what you’re gonna get. And then people come to it expecting something drier and sometimes they get a sweeter wine and vice versa. Yeah, the lack of, um, visibility of the bottles is a problem in Alsace. But I will say, for me, you know, I don't want too much conformity out of Alsace. Part of what I love about Alsace is the diversity of it. And, you know, I'm fond of telling people I buy wine from that, you know, be warned. If I, If I like something, usually it's not going to be marketable. I like the unmarketable thing, but, you know, I think, you know, it's this wonderful rabbit hole to fall down.
There's so much to discover in this really small place. And I think I find that really exciting. Yeah, sure. Diversity is a richness for the region, and is incomparable to any other regions. But the only thing is the consumer should be able to see before taking the bottle. If the wine will be dry, not dry, and which kind of level of sweetness. That's the only thing. And often now in France, people do not take the bottle of Alsace because they don't know. And that's a problem. But it's a question of labeling and rules again. So we're good. I think it's a really great segue to the flight of three different Grand Cru Rieslings here. So we have wines from north to south, representative of some very different.
Soil types within the broader region and kinds of different styles of winemaking, and one cooperative and two kind of smaller independent estates. So kind of a fun, a fun lineup here. And we're going to start, of course, we're going to go from from north to south. And we're going to start with your Engelberg, which is the Angel's Hill. And from what I've read of it, Melanie has been documented as a very special place to make wine since 884. Now, what is what is so special about this particular site within Alsace? Here again, limestone. But different kind of limestone, it's it's a younger limestone. As you said, million-million years separate those two bedrocks. But here the limestone is much closer to the surface. We have 50 centimeters of earth or rocky earth.
And then roots just dig into the cracked limestone, which is oolitic limestone. And so the minerality, this calcareous texture appears much clearly here in this wine. It's a very small Grand Cru at the Alsace scale. It's only 15 hectares when other Grand Cru in Alsace are much bigger. And on 15 hectares it's all south oriented. It's the middle of middle of the slope. Really, when you when when I work there in the vineyard, it's it's has a diversity of there are lots of bushes and an old quarry right in the middle of the Grand Cru, which. Yes, it seems like a very special site. And I love on your website, you have a picture that situates the your particular parcel within the larger Grand Cru. There are 51 Grand Cru in Alsace.
And I think sometimes people criticize the Grand Cru system as expanding the scope of the individual vineyards too much. But, you know, I think for me as a wine lover, what I get really excited about in Alsace is, you know, the way the individual Grand Cru's, you know, reflect this diversity of soil types within within the region. So, you know, you have worked at other domains in Alsace. You have worked, you know, most famously at the Zinnubrecht, which has holdings in the southerly most Grand Cru that we're going to visit for the sake of a different producer. You know, some of Olivier's wines are a little too expensive a time to track down. But the larger cooperative represented here that has the third largest holdings in Rangin at the very least.
How does Riesling grow and express differently on, you know, let's say limestone than it does on the granite that we're about to taste and the volcanic soils of Rangin? It's Riesling. The first thing to say is Riesling is a real sport. So you will, you'll guess and you'll you'll get. And those differences and Riesling on limestone give give give wines that generally need time to to show to show the complexity we're expecting. And Riesling on granite will be more expressive at the beginning, showing the food. The food is always here since the beginning or almost on the nose, at least when our limestone could be a bit closed and on on volcanic soil like the Rangin here you feel Rangin has a really strong impact on wine.
Flavors are a bit different, sometimes with a bit of smokiness. And and you you may guess it, you may have it in your glass. But then in the in the structure of the wine, Riesling on limestone has a kind of broad acidity. On granite and on volcanic, it's a bit differently on the palate. Riesling on limestone is long lasting, really powerful. When still, still keeping its elegant style. I really love to watch the Rieslings on limestone evolve. And, you know, we're drinking the 2016 here. And what I love about, you know, your particular wine is just like this citric intensity, it's like all the, you know, like, you know, kind of citrus zest. And then there's the thing, you know, there's a purity to it.
There's a, you know, kind of like it's almost penetrating the acidity. But it's not austere. You know, it's still, you know, balanced and enveloping in a really lovely way. And then if you move into the Vauxhall, this is this is a wine that Vauxhall is an amazing estate in the same family for generations upon end. The label designed by cousins just after the World War Two. And Brand means fire in old German. It is one of the driest vineyards in Alsace. And I'll pull up the map again so you can get a sense of just just where you are. And this is a case where I wish. So Brand is here. You know, it's incredible, you know, kind of from north to south spread here. So Engelberg is here.
You almost like dealing with like one degree of latitude difference between vineyard sites. And then Rangan is all the way at the southerly extreme. And, you know, for people that nerd out about, you know, kind of terroir. There's no terroir. There's no notion of wine expressing a sense of place. And embodied in that are also the people that are making the wine. So terroir is a sense of collected memory of a site that is built up over generations upon end. So terroir doesn't exist without us to interpret it. But, you know, what was Melanie was speaking to of the, you know, Riesling on granite. And it's not directly on granite, degraded granite. Granite tends to degrade into kind of larger, larger sand than than limestone does. And it's much more; it's less water retentive.
But you do get these wines, they're kind of explosively aromatic out of the glass. And if you're trying the Vauxhalla brand at home, I think you get a sense of, you know, that kind of explosive power and it's almost tropical. The wine is almost like guava or papaya. It's just it's very forward. You know, it's, you know, you know, like a close talker, you know, at a party where, you know, you know, wine; limestone-driven Rieslings are a little more reticent, a little more thoughtful. And then I think, you know, for the Rangan, which is an impossibly steep site. And Melanie, did you did you get to work the vineyards at Rangen when you were working with Olivier Umbricht? Actually, I worked at both at Brandt and Rangen. So it's perfect.
And and my vintage there was O3, which was the best ever. So I don't tell you in in the Rangen with a slope like this by 40 degrees Celsius. It was it was really, really a warm, warm, warm vintage. But the quality of the soil was just so different from what I knew so far, you know. And that was really interesting. Yeah. So Rangen is unique in Alsace for having the kind of volcanic soil it does. And it has some of the oldest soil in Alsace at over 400 million years old. And it’s entirely mostly south facing. The it does curve a bit around the village. It’s preposterously steep. You know, you’re talking almost well over 45 degrees, almost 70 degrees in some places. The Zinnabrück parcel, in particular, is is thus the steepest.
The wine that we’re enjoying comes is adjacent to the shop at Parcel, which is slightly less steep than Zinnabrück, but still very steep. It should be said that, too, this is kind of a taste of Alsace’s history. This is a site that was largely abandoned because it was too hard to work after World War Two. And then when Zinnabrück resurrected it, along with other people, they found unexploded grenades and ordinances, bombs from World War Two because the land itself had yet to be worked, you know, and they were reviving this tradition of working this particular site. And, you know, these are wines that were celebrated by Peter the Great. They were celebrated by the most famous courts throughout Europe, you know, throughout the high Renaissance.
But, you know, after World War Two and, you know, the deprivations that Alsace, you know, had to endure, it was just too much work to farm these sites until, you know, you had individual pioneers, you know, like Zinnabrück, like Schaffet, like, you know, Wuppberger here, some of the producers that revived that tradition. And, you know, Wuppberger is a large cooperative. I don't want to, like, you know, steer away from that. There are quite a few cooperatives in Alsace. But significantly, this is a vineyard site that's actually farmed biodynamically. So, you know, not all of their vineyards, being a cooperative, are farmed that way. But, you know, they are forward and progressive thinking enough on their, you know, the most famous site to work that way.
And, you know, for me, the other thing that volcanic soil really expresses with Riesling is, you know, what is called the petrol, that TDN, this like kind of greasy, oily, you know, you know, almost like scorched earth quality. And you can imagine this black rock, you know, in the site absorbing all this summer heat. And then, you know, kind of even over the course of the night, you know, continuing to radiate that heat to the vines. So you get, you know, this big shift between daytime high and nighttime low. But, you know, you are constantly warmed by this rock in the site. And, you know, that's why grapes like Pinot Gris in particular and Gewürztraminer work really well in this site as well.
And the Riesling has a very different, almost like unctuous kind of texture, I think the texture of Riesling from these volcanic sites is very different than the others. Riesling has this property of being really suitable to all those types of soils and giving always excellent results by the time it's picked at the right time. The thing is, because Riesling can do that, Riesling is a really late, late-ripening variety, when this year we will pick, we'll start picking on Tuesday for the Crèmeux grapes, Riesling will probably be picked beginning of October, being totally dry and keeping their acidity like this. So it's a late ripening grape that needs to be ripe and to have a ripe acidity. That's the that's the point. That's the point of Riesling. And it's funny, Melanie.
So I love Riesling, and we have been launching a series of classes around Riesling. And I thank all of you for joining us because I know you get sometimes tired of hearing about Riesling, but for those of us that love Riesling, one of the things that we love the most about it is the way it expresses this sense of place. And, you know, I hope for those of you that got the three different wines from three different Grands Crus, you know, there is such a diversity of flavor profiles. You know, this is citrusy and pure and melony, you know, you know, from from Boxler. This is, you know, overripe and opulent and showy. You know, it is, you know, like the Carmen Miranda of wines, you know.
And then, you know, from Rangan, this is, you know, greasy and petrily and, you know, something entirely different and, you know, to have all of those things from one grape in this narrow bit of land from this small place. You know, there's something very miraculous about that, that, you know, those of us who love wine can't help but celebrating, celebrate. So, you know, I hope that you yourselves, you know, are finding cause to celebrate that. But Zoe, we've been neglecting you. What questions do people have for the both of us? Yeah, there are so many great questions. First, I think it might be helpful to start off with just clarifying the Grand Cru system in Alsace and in particular how it didn't come about until the 1970s and how that, in particular, affected the Pfister estate.
But also Alsace as a whole. And so the Grand Cru system here was the first Grand Cru to be classified was the Schlossberg in 75 and actually the whole Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée (AOC) system came after World War II because of these troubled times. It came later than in other regions in France. And first, we had one Alsace Appalachian and so the growers wanted to just to show that some vineyards would deserve more attention. And so they decided production, all the producers, winemakers, decided to launch a Grand Cru, Alsace Grand Cru Appalachian. And each village was asked if there were some sites that would deserve a Grand Cru Appalachian. And so those were suggested and then selected and officially officially named Grand Cru after several, several checks.
Of course, quality of the wines, history of the site, geology, exposition system. And and the fact that it was a collective, Appalachian. So Grand Cru were not given when when when there was only one grower on the site. So that was that was the thing of Alsace Grand Cru. And so fifty one the first a first batch of twenty five appeared and then twenty five others. So during a long time there were fifty Grand Cru in Alsace and and the last one came in two thousand seven, I think, seven, seven. And there are it should be said it's it's it goes from entry level to Grand Cru. There's no it's not it's not like Burgundy. There's no Premier Cru. There is actually a project of of launching some Premier Cru in Alsace.
And there are already some communal Appalachians, but not communal like in Burgundy. Not not village like in Burgundy, but like. There is a Silvaner from Blingshwiler. It's always related to a grape, which is a kind of weird weird thing. Alsace was doing the thing I would say the wrong way. It was too fast, the Grand Cru. And now they are really selective to have the Premier Cru. But in all cases, Grand Cru now in Alsace are specific rights. It's not it's not this domain, which is a Grand Cru. It's it's a it's a definition on the map. And with, of course, rules that are stricter than for the Alsace Appalachian. Not every grape is allowed as a Grand Cru. There are four noble grapes, plus some exceptions in in some of the Grand Cru.
And and the wines are tasted. And to be approved as Grand Cru. Fabulous. Do you have any pairing recommendations for these three wines that we're tasting, the Engelberg, the Pau, and the Burg? So for the Engelberg, 2016, 2016 is a vintage that is still a bit young. So do not do not hesitate to decant it and give him some air. And when showing a bit more value, if you have a good pairing, you can have a little bit of volume with fishes. Fishes with those poultry is also a very good pairing for the Berg. Berg is is pretty accessible. 2018 is a vintage where wines show fruit. Quite immediate. You need something which is more delicate as well, so seafood. Where the acidity brings just the lift that's that's needed.
And then Par. Par is our Pinot Blanc Auxerrois blend. Par meaning a pair, a couple in German or in Alsatian. And this one is a wine that's lighter, which which is really it's probably the less aromatic of all the grapes in Alsace, of the grapes we do grow. And it's a kind of easy pairing wine, very accessible, approachable. And so summer wine, easy drinking with lots of salads, buffet and things like that. That's awesome. We have a guest who is drinking the Pair with some anchovies and finds it a beautiful pairing. So perfect. All right. All right. We also have some questions about the Alsatian bottle shape instead of the Burgundian or the Bordeaux style that we're used to seeing. There's a there's a name, don't you say Flut d'Assas?
La Flutte. Yeah, La Flutte means the. And it's a mandatory shape. It's the Rhine Valley shape bottle. And that's so you may find different heights. It's thirty-three centimeters, thirty-five centimeters. But it's a it's a mandatory shape. Yeah, we have to use it. And does it affect the wine in any specific ways? No, I've it's it's just sometimes more difficult to put it on your fridge because it's too high. Melanie, I've read that historically the bottle was shaped this way because in Germany it was the so so cabinet was the old notion of reserve, you know, and referred to the like cabinet. They would store the wines in. So they wanted a slimmer bottle to lay down in, you know, these wine cabinets. Is there any truth to that or.
OK, I didn't know that actually. No, no, I was reading this. There could be no truth to that. OK, no, it could be. Who knows? If you had your choice, what kind of bottle would you put the wine in? This thing is now I'm we are engaged in a sustainable certificate. And the thing is that so you see on the Engelberg, the body is higher, is taller. And and now actually the recent bottlings, the recent bottlings have all the shape of the 18 because I try to reduce my carbon footprint and in a for a bottle of wine, almost half of the carbon footprint is the weight of glass of the end of the empty bottle. So the the total bottle was five hundred and fifty grams.
And the smaller one is for forty, I reduced everything to a to a lighter, lighter bottle. That's the first thing. So now I I really if I would have the choice, of course, it would be light glass shorter bottles because the thirty, the taller is not not really practical in any way. And of course, Burgundy is a more classical shape of bottles. And probably common to anyone, but it's it represents us to have this this fleet shape. So I think the choice we made recently are good. I, I rather I rather like it because I feel like it within France in particular, it gives you a separate identity, you know, it's like, you know, we we are French, but we are different, you know? Yeah, yeah. That's kind of a good segue.
We are always interested in how climate change affects vintners. And how does it affect your village in particular? My just to give you a concrete example, my father in 40 years of time of of harvest now sees the the first day of picking four weeks ahead. So global warming definitely is here. Of course, it's not only global warming that that's gay that gives this result. It's also due to better practices in the vineyard, encouraging concentration and so on, and everything has to be re re think, re re think, re think. Rethinking of everything, because definitely we we want to keep our accession, freshness, the style of everything. But it's not easy. I saw in being in the northern part of the vineyard is a is a great chance because we'll be less affected than down south.
But still, we feel it. And so we we have to to to to to to to manage the vineyard a bit differently. When everybody in 10 years ago, every 20 years ago, everybody was was talking about reducing yields, reducing yields, but reducing yields to have to to concentrated grapes is not is not is not the best solution to. To to fight against that. So we have to to think about everything. Of course, yields have to be carefully managed, but not in a in an extreme way. And we have different factors where we can play. So we leave a higher canopy to have more shadow on the on the grapes. We my father was a pioneer in no-till culture that was already made in in the 80s.
So we we see you cover crops in in between the room. And significantly, you are like Francois Chidane. You don't till. Yeah, it's it's really amazing. Yeah, we just last week we just you we have some prototypes of sewing machines to shoot in the grass, which is already here and in the in the marsh. That's that we we kept during the whole the whole summer because the the function, the big advantage is now we we we have always covered soils, no new soils anymore, and that's been for ages now. And why why is it a big asset? It's those cover crops brings, of course, they they play the role of fertilizers because some of them just keep the nitrogen from from the air. They have different systems of roots.
So they dig the soil by themselves without having to to to go with a machine. And and by mulching them or just. Rolling them, we keep a layer of of mush, which keeps humidity and and fresher temperature in the soils because everything is done to have biological activity in the soils and if worms have. A new soil on the top of them, they just they're killed because the difference between a new soil and a cupboard could be so in Celsius temperature could be 45 to 25. It's it's a huge difference. And and I think that we we have advanced in that way because, yeah, that's something that we. We, that's an example, exactly. So, on the left, you have a bed, of course, and the cover crops that we see you on in autumn and on the previous autumn, so there are seeds are designed to go through winter so they don't freeze.
And in the spring, they grow, and it grows. So, on the picture, on the right, you see the. On the very, on the row, which is the on the very right side, the crops go so so high as as the as the canes of the vines, and one of the rows has been merged, and you see that it makes a big layer of mush, and we keep that on the top of the soil. And it also it also creates competition for the vines, which can be very useful for the sake of kind of lengthening that ripening window, and, you know, kind of delaying, you know, that ripening process. So you get, you know, that longer, you know, kind of ripening window and that more complex development of flavors in the grapes.
It's it brings competition, but not too much because. It brings also nitrogen, but yeah, it just makes the balance and it gives when we merge it. We we make it just when the when vines need it, when when shoots are growing, they need a kind of push of nitrogen and then we know. And it's it's just a good start to to to that. And then the competition could be against water, too. But it's actually not because it keeps water much better. Well, and also, you know, there's so much happening under the soil. For the sake of, you know, those root systems and the fungus and, you know, the bacteria that are exchanging nutrients in a way that is beneficial to the whole ecosystem and not just, you know, the individual vines or the individual cover crops; and, you know, that that is terroir in a really profound sense.
Yeah, that's that's a fascinating thing about mycorrhizae and so on. And and my father was doing that just by instinct in the 80s. Nobody was talking about the science about. Yeah. Yeah. And and it's it's just it's just amazing because now I'm lucky to have vineyards that are 35, 40, 50, 60 years old, having this system of cultures since 30 years almost. And that we have lively, lively soils everywhere. And that brings liveliness in the wines, too, because all those mycorrhizae, when, when the vines, the vine has mycorrhizae, it's mycorrhizae are much more able to take minerals from the soil than the than the roots of the vine itself. So it should it should be said.
So mycorrhizae is actually a German word coined by German scientists, but in as much as human beings, so a lot of the nutrients that we depend on, we cannot break down ourselves, we depend on microorganisms in our guts to break them down and slowly leach them into our bodies. So Bill Jensen is a human being, but I'm also a colony of all sorts of microbiota and I, I could not live without all sorts of, you know, symbiotic things, you know, on me. The grapevine is the same way. And a lot of the especially the mineral nutrient uptake that happens at the root level for grapevines happens because of the action of these kind of like mutually dependent fungal systems.
And a course of study that has developed over the last decade or so, and that we're learning a lot more about, and you know, it makes us very humble because, you know, these are things that, you know, we didn't know fully about, and that we were disrupting through our farming practices. And, you know, we are much I think, you know, people who look at these connections and study the science of it are much more likely to kind of let nature take its course than they are to intervene more aggressively. So let's let's bring it so we will have time for questions. I promise. I just want to taste these two wines, so that, you know, people that are doing other things can do other things, but Pinot Blanc and Pinot Gris.
So, Melanie, we have your Pinot Blanc. It should be said that this is in part. So Melanie recently rebranded her wines and put her own name on the labels and different names for the cuvées. So she calls it Par to reflect the fact that we're dealing with both Pinot Blanc and Auxerrois. And it should be said that Pinot Blanc is part of this like weird family of interrelated Pinots, which is a big family. It's a genetically identical grape, but has many different expressions. Auxerrois is basically like offspring of Pinot and Guay Blanc, much like Chardonnay and Gamay and Melon and a million other grapes. But at any rate, you have those two together, but kind of more of like in Alsace, more kind of like a humble, everyday drinking wine.
What do you love about Pinot Blanc? Pinot Blanc is, yeah, it's an it's our daily wine, but it's a very interesting wine, actually, and very often in Alsace, Pinot Blanc under the label Pinot Blanc. It's a blend of Pinot Blanc and those two grapes, actually are pretty different in the way Pinot Blanc brings freshness, has much higher acidity than an Auxerrois. Auxerrois has more texture. It's it's rounder on the palate. It brings more fruit, has more like this typically floral white flowers aromas. So, blending both is is pretty interesting because you have the freshness of the Pinot Blanc and the roundness and the chewy thing of the Auxerrois. What I like about Pinot Blanc is that it's a wine that has much more depth than we could think of.
The first when when when drinking the first sip, OK, it's a light wine, easy drinking, but actually it's it has much more depth than we think. And it's easy pairing. And it's a wine with global warming that does not this one is not so impacted. Like Gewurztraminer is going like crazy in sugar with global warming. Pinot Blanc is OK. So that's a that's a grape for the future. So only only dessert wine for Gewürzt, but you can still make dry Pinot Blanc and macération. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, and so I also so we also have, it should be said, wine from Trimbach. So Melanie is an eighth generation winemaker. Trimbach dates back even further to 1626. They're on their 13th generation now and Pinot Gris.
And one of my favorite quotes about Pinot Gris comes from a different winemaker entirely, so Philippe Blanc is a part of another estate that goes back a million generation. And Philippe said about Pinot Gris that it is our red wine. And I actually served it at the restaurant and poured it into a white wine glass. And he was very upset and said, no, no. And made me come back with a larger bowl for his Pinot Gris because he said this is our red wine. And there's Pinot Gris on the vine. And we talked about this in previous classes. It is Gewürztraminer actually, a ruddy-colored kind of pink grape. And it has this fleshy tonality and this this force. This power, and comparing it to Pinot Blanc, especially in the Trimbach reserves 2015, this is a pretty warm vintage.
This is also an off-dry wine, but off-dry in a sense, in the German sense, I think of the wine is as dry as it needs to be. So, you know, what a little sweetness there is, is a balancing force. And there's a wonderful seesaw quality to it. And and for me, one of my favorite pairings in the world. Spicy Thai food and Alsatian Pinot Blanc is just so good. And it amazes me that, you know, you have these, you know, very different corners of the world and Alsace and Southeast Asia. Yet they made things that go so beautifully together. And I love the way that wine works that way sometimes. But Alsatian Pinot Blanc or Pinot Gris rather is is a powerful wine that ages really, really beautifully, but almost for me, like a red wine masquerading as white.
So, Melanie, you make Pinot Gris yourself. How would you compare Pinot Gris to the Pinot Blanc that you make? Pinot Gris, first, has is. Has more power. Pinot Gris is all about texture. Pinot Gris is is has this oily texture and and it's really, everything is like this. Pinot Gris is much, much rounder. It's it makes a kind of layer on your on the whole palate. And that's that's definitely the one of the natural thing of the Pinot Gris. And yes, Philippe, Philippe, when he says that it's our red wine, it's it's a nice expression and and definitely Pinot Gris is is very dark colored. It's it has grapes are purple when when people. Walk in the vineyards, they think it's a red grape, but it's it's a white grape and it's very close to to Pinot Noir.
And, you know, how do you treat Pinot Gris in your vineyards? How do you work with it in the vineyards? Pinot Gris, because we do dry Pinot Gris and on two different sites and the one is. Always based on limestone, but has a much deeper soil, soil of Marlin, Marlin, limestone, and so maturity is slowly there and allows us to have a dry Pinot Gris with 13 and a half degrees of alcohol, so. Because the big thing about Pinot Gris is to manage to have when when when we want it dry and to keep the sugar content of the grapes. It's just not too not too high. And the skins have to be ripe for Pinot Gris. That's the point.
And in that way, Philippe is really is definitely right, because when pressing a Pinot Gris, even if it's pressed directly with no maceration, we do longer pressing like five, six hours. And if the grape is not ripe, so phenolically with the skins and the seeds, the risk is that you may extract some less noble things. So when when picking, you have to take care of this. This parameter of maturity and the thing is often Pinot Gris at this level of of maturity have already pretty high sugar content. And on the one of our sites, it's really. It's really cool because my father chose that to plant Pinot Gris and and it's it finishes dry. So I have one more question for you, Melanie, before we're going to give a toast and then if you're gracious enough, I'm sure Zoe has more questions for you from our listeners.
But one of my favorite things about, you know, a sauce is the sense of tradition that a lot of producers have, I think, you know, it's desperately rare to have, you know, someone like you. That's an eighth-generation winemaker. And there's so much that comes with that. We're in a unique moment globally. And, you know, what have you learned from, you know, your fellow visitors, you know, your grandfather, their partners who have lived through, you know, war, famine, plague, etc. Do you find yourself, you know, kind of, you know, kind of remembering back or looking through historical records to try to understand how they dealt with those things, because it's very real. And I'll sauce until very recently. You know, I'll sauce was in a century's worth of, you know, political maelstrom.
And on top of that, you know, you know, you dealt with, you know, the Spanish influence and also other things. So, you know, are there any lessons there for the rest of us? Sure. The Spanish influence has a big history and troubled times existed since the beginning, almost in Alsace. So we know that nature, nature brings well, nature continues. So we when when the world was during Covid, nature continued. We had work in the vineyards and during wars it was the same. But men, men were at war and women continued. So this is it's it's pretty we have to be humble and we know that we are farmers and farmers. We can we can do with less, less connection, less everything. But in that now times evolved.
And of course, during wars, when when the world was everything was more local and local was really affected. And it was it was probably really tough at the time, too. Now we know that we work differently. The work even even between my my my father, my father was born after a war and he didn't experience that time. And and even between his job and my job now, we have different different aspects of the job. He he was definitely only a farmer. Now we have to be a bit more. More than that. You have to you have to participate in Zoom calls at 10 a.m. By example, but but that gives us also a much broader view of of the world. And I mean, as we have every every everyone has a capacity of resilience.
I don't know. And vines also vines also have this resilience capacity, which is just amazing when when we see the drought that we had this year. But vines still ripens its fruits and it's it's crazy. So we we have really big strengths, inner strengths. And as I said, maybe more developed than others because we have we have this history. And and we were once French, one German. And we we have to adapt. We have to adapt. And that's more than more than true nowadays. Well, that is that's really beautiful. And I think so that's all toast to resilience. It sounds it sounds better in French. That couldn't be true alone together as always. Thank you so much for joining us, Melanie. If you can stay on, I'm sure that Zoe has more questions, but thank you all.
Zoe, what do you have for us? Thanks. Well, as a very good segue, this now may seem like a silly question, but how will this harvest be different in 2020 with COVID? And how will you be adapted in this year? So we. We pick everything by hand. Things are a bit harder because our team of pickers is composed of retired people, especially Melanie. So, in the region, I know there's a lot of in France, a lot of guest workers as well. So, you have a lot of states will use like Eastern European, like Polish or Romanian, because yours are all older retirees. We we have only local people like really to be integrated in our team. You have to speak a session. Oh, really? So I can't I couldn't pick there.
And no, actually, the the the the the big thing in Alsace is that we have a really long period of picking. We to pick to pick our 10 hectares of vines. We need to harvest, right? Almost easily six weeks, but not not in a row. We we pick we will pick next week, maybe two, two days. We stop with the next week will be one or two days and we stop. So we we need flexible and available people. And so our team of pickers, retired people is really perfect. That's amazing. How many? Twenty five. So how do how do you get in touch with the retirees? Is it like a Facebook group? Is it like they all they all have a commodity, portable like iPhones or they all have phones.
And that's a big. That's a big thing that that they all have that. And I have a group and I send them a text and they say just, OK, OK. And so the big thing will be that we will harvest with masks this year. So it could be a bit tough. So we as we harvest so early, we will we will pick early in the morning. So we start at 630 in the morning. And we will do we will pick probably until until noon. And yeah, we will have social distancing also at lunch because when they come and some of them come for more than 20 years, they also come for the ambience, the lunch, the good lunch that we have. And so that's for lunch. The ambience will be different.
We will have separate tables and I don't know. I don't. I don't know how to how to how to approach that. I don't know. Yeah, we'll be different. We'll see. I could. I could tell you that on Wednesday. Do you have a particular varietal that you're fond of? Do you have a favorite? Riesling, definitely, because we have it in the region, Riesling represents some 20 percent and we have 30, 30 percent of Rieslings. Oh, wow. I would have honestly, I thought it was higher. But we have, we have seven different grapes. We have Chardonnay for the sparkling. We have yeah, it's, we have almost 15 percent of Pinot Noir. Which grape is the most challenging to work with? Muscat. Oh, you have Muscat.
OK, every, every like Muscat and Gewurz are the most challenging. Challenge Muscat regarding vines because it's a really sensitive grape. Vines are like bushes and they are really sensitive during fruit set. So sometimes we have a really low crop because of the bad, bad flowering. Gewurz is more challenging regarding the date of picking and the maturity of the grapes. Because we are looking for an optimum of aromas, but not too much sugar. Narrow, narrow window. Yeah, it's like, I don't know if you know Eddie Izzard. There's this great, he's this English comic. There's this great Eddie Izzard skit with fruit going from ripe to overripe in like a minute. And I feel like Gewurz does that. It goes from like good to like over the top. You know? Yeah, exactly.
And that's that's why we're so many pickers. In the past 40 years ago, my father had a team of 10, 12 people. Now we have to be really reactive. This plot has to be picked tomorrow and in the morning it has to be it has to be picked. So we had a bigger team and because of that in one week, you can imagine, a grape can take one, one or one and a half degrees potential of alcohol. That's crazy. Yeah. In the past, in the past, picking on Monday or Friday was was almost no difference. Now it's it's a huge difference. Yeah. It's fascinating. With the Organization of Women Winemakers, how did that come about? And could you talk a little bit more about your community from that perspective? Yeah.
So of course, now being a winemaker as a female is possible. In the past, during my father's generation, there were only a few. Now it's possible. And and we created an association in Alsace called Les Divines d'Alsace, which is part of of a national association called the Femmes de Vin. And which is a federation of 10 different regional associations in Burgundy, Rhone, Champagne, Loire, Bordeaux, Southwest, Languedoc, Provence. And it's a it's a really nice network because network of help of just exchanging information. And we try, of course, we we're so spread out in France that we come to meet really, really often, but we try to do that once every year in different regions to discover to discover the region to and to see what's what's going on in the different regions to have a kind of.
We also try to set projects for the for for the different regions this year. For example, we due to COVID, one region created a project that was in Languedoc to to help people to help our network of restaurant. That means when we have people, customers coming in our cellar doors to to to buy wines, we would give we give them voucher for 30 euros to less reduction to go for dinner in a partner restaurant. And so it's a kind of positive circle to just to encourage people going back to restaurant after this tough period. That's fantastic. I find it so interesting that it took, you know, World War Two, where men were out of the vineyard sites and women filled that vacuum as a place and a time for there to be women's growth, despite the fact that, you know, Le Grand Dom, you know, started disgorge in such a history of women that it's only really been for your generation and then start an organization and to be a little bit more organized.
Yeah, women were always working in the vineyards. Actually, women were always here in the farms, in the vineyards. In the vineyards everywhere. But the thing is that they were never in the in front of the domain. They were backwards and doing tasks in the vineyards or in the office. Now, now we just want to show that women are here and that we're able to to make wines and to manage the men. Having your name on the bottle is fantastic. And I'm sure of that as well. Yeah. Some people ask me, 'But what did your father say?' And I said, 'My father encouraged me to do that.' You have a really good dad. That's amazing. We have a guest who really wants to know where you're filming from. Is this your wine cellar behind you?
Yes, it's it's our wine. It's a new tasting room, actually, that we that we've built one year ago. But actually, the wall behind me – it is was discovered during the building of the of this room. And it's made of limestone soil, or rather, limestone stones that we found in the vineyards. And this wall we found; my father found a date. Sixteen sixty. So it's a really old wall. That's so neat. Do you have any other favorite favorite regions where Riesling is found that's not Alsace, the Finger Lakes or perhaps Australia? I, I, I, I did my kind of thesis in in Germany, in Rheingau and Rheingau is really; I really had a crush for this region, too. All right. Yeah.
Yeah, it's totally different because you have slates on the slopes and yeah, it's still; still south facing, though, so powerful dry wines. Yeah. Who are your favorite producers in the Rheingau? Is a Breuer. Makes really good wines, Breuer, Georg Breuer, Breuer. I like the wines from Eva, Eva Fricke. If wines from but now has really nice wines, too. Like, I like the wines from Donoff, from some because actually they're so different. I like Riesling. And now that everything is so accessible now, because in France we are a bit protective regarding wines. So we mostly find French wines in France. But it tends to change and now we have access to all the wines and that's really interesting. But I didn't taste enough Finger Lakes wines, for example.
No, I really would love to; I love those producers and I spend a lot of time with them. And I think it's fascinating to me, Melanie, because if there is a region in the world making Riesling that is analogous to the Finger Lakes, it's Alsace. The difference is that the reckoning window is shorter. So they have flowering later than you do because it's very cold. It's much colder during the winter than it is in Alsace. And then, you know, it gets hotter in the summer. So it's not ideal, but they have some of the same weight. But the wines, when they're, you know, good, can be elegant and powerful in the way that Alsatian Riesling is as well. And I think that it is a very, it's a good wine.
It's very much a cool climate region, much like Alsace is. And I think it's a very special terroir in a way that people haven't come to appreciate yet. And I like underappreciated things. You know, things. And I think that Alsace is grossly underappreciated. And I hope that, you know, people listening, you know, feel the same way because we haven't touched upon the natural beauty of the place. And it is preposterously gorgeous. And then, you know, from town to town, I don't think that people realize, like, you know, Strasbourg, Colmar, they're the most idyllic little villages you could ever want to visit in the world. And, you know, that alone is worth celebrating. And then they happen to make these wines that they just go beautifully with any food.
And they're profoundly expressive of place in a way that, you know, deserves more champions. And I know, I imagine for you on the ground, you know, it feels very different than it does for me, you know, promoting the wines. But, you know, of all the classes we've done, this is one where I just want people to drink the wines. I want people to celebrate the wines. I just want them to drink more of them. That's right. Yeah. And you're right also. I'm not objective. But I have the feeling that Alsace would deserve much more attention. It's misunderstood. And, you know. When I took over 12 years ago, and at the time when the first tastings I did, even in Paris, people think Alsace is good, but it doesn't sell. It's not.
You're dealing with Parisians. It's 12 years after. It's still good. It's still good. It still has to be explained. And we have great wines. And when you see vineyards in Alsace, they are trained, most of them are organically, so not most of them, but lots of them are organically farmed. Everything is really beautiful. And we do lots of efforts. It's a lot easier to work that way in Alsace than it is in the Loire. In Burgundy. Because it's much drier there. It is. True. But Alsace has a kind of green conscience. Green. Oh, yeah. Thumb. Thumb. They say green thumb. Because, I don't. It's always been like this. And vineyards. When you walk in the vineyards, it's absolutely beautiful. And you see that efforts are done in the vineyards to make good grapes, good wines.
And the result is selling Alsace could be tough. But once people taste it, generally they just are fond of our wines. But the step of trying to taste Alsace is a high step. One last question for you, Melanie, before we let you, you know, go to bed and wake up early, as I'm sure you will, because you have a lot to clean in the winery. Exactly. So like 90% of winemaking is cleaning and sterilizing things. I don't know if people realize that. But what are your hopes for, so within the next couple of decades, what are your hopes for your domain and for the region? Hope is definitely for the region. Because. As I said, Alsace, Alsace has a huge potential and the potential is already here in the bottles that are produced now.
Of course, Alsace has also challenges to face, global warming. We have some new, new possibilities. Red is coming with, with power in Alsace. So Pinot Noir is definitely a grape to watch in Alsace because it's, it's really improving and for the domain is just that we, we try to be the more sustainable we can. We, we have a team, a team of permanent workers, which is great and we, we, I just hope it will continue this way for For the rest of my career and and of course we, we are all ambassadors of Alsace, of the Alsace region and And any time a winemaker talk about his wines. They all talk about the region because the region is so diverse, diverse and And that's Alsace. Alsace has lots of things to show and to, and to tell. And yeah, we, we, we love, we all love our region. Merci, Alsace Jeton, Melanie Jeton, thank you so much for joining us and yeah, it's been such a pleasure. Was a pleasure for me too.
